Diaries From Gielinor: Tuska Event Fatigue

June 3rd, 2015 Connor

As I work on this piece, my character is toiling away semi-afk balancing on Tuska’s spine for agility experience and Tuska fragments that can be turned in for points. At 8:44 am, more than halfway through the day in server-time, the overall contribution isn’t at 50%. It isn’t even close.

RuneScape’s third world event is only three days in and already players are getting discouraged and seemingly dropping out. Tuska has won the first two days, leading players to speculate whether or not the event has been rigged to give Tuska an early lead and raise the tension, or whether Jagex overestimated the abilities of the community and made the event too hard by accident.

One major issue brought up is that since the Tuska daily event can be easily capped in one run, players don’t have any incentive to return other than for the good of the fight. As I’ve said numerous times before, Jagex has long nurtured RuneScape into a game centered around efficiency, and as a result (whether they like it or not) if it isn’t on the higher end of the reward/time spectrum, players will simply ignore it. This is the culture that Jagex created, and one that will guide development.

In the long run, rewards will beat lore every time. If it isn’t rewarding, players won’t do it. If something else exists that is more rewarding, they’ll spend their time doing that. If the event is being purposely designed for players to lose, they’ll get discouraged and stop participating completely, because they have no real participation in the event.

I’d like to see a response from Jagex about how this event is going to play out, because we haven’t even reached the end of day 3 and people are already worn out.